Self-Care for Tough Times – by Suzy Reading
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A note on the author: while not “Dr. Reading”, she is a “CPsychol, B Psych (Hons), M Psych”; a Chartered Psychologist specializing in wellbeing, stress management and facilitation of healthy lifestyle change. So this is coming from a place of research and evidence!
The kinds of “tough times” she has in mind are so numerous that listing them takes two pages in the book, so we won’t try here. But suffice it to say, there are a lot of things that can go wrong for us as humans, and this book addresses how to take care of ourselves mindfully in light of them.
The author takes a “self-care is health care” approach, and goes about things with a clinical mindset and/but a light tone, offering both background information, and hands-on practical advice.
Bottom line: there may be troubles ahead (and maybe you’re in the middle of troubles right now), but there’s always room for a little sunshine too.
Click here to check out Self-Care For Tough Times, and care for yourself in tough times!
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More Salt, Not Less?
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝I’m curious about the salt part – learning about LMNT and what they say about us needing more salt than what’s recommended by the government, would you mind looking into that? From a personal experience, I definitely noticed a massive positive difference during my 3-5 day water fasts when I added salt to my water compared to when I just drank water. So I’m curious what the actual range for salt intake is that we should be aiming for.❞
That’s a fascinating question, and we’ll have to tackle it in several parts:
When fasting
3–5 days is a long time to take only water; we’re sure you know most people fast from food for much less time than that. Nevertheless, when fasting, the body needs more water than usual—because of the increase in metabolism due to freeing up bodily resources for cellular maintenance. Water is necessary when replacing cells (most of which are mostly water, by mass), and for ferrying nutrients around the body—as well as escorting unwanted substances out of the body.
Normally, the body’s natural osmoregulatory process handles this, balancing water with salts of various kinds, to maintain homeostasis.
However, it can only do that if it has the requisite parts (e.g. water and salts), and if you’re fasting from food, you’re not replenishing lost salts unless you supplement.
Normally, monitoring our salt intake can be a bit of a guessing game, but when fasting for an entire day, it’s clear how much salt we consumed in our food that day: zero
So, taking the recommended amount of sodium, which varies but is usually in the 1200–1500mg range (low end if over aged 70+; high end if aged under 50), becomes sensible.
More detail: How Much Sodium You Need Per Day
See also, on a related note:
When To Take Electrolytes (And When We Shouldn’t!)
When not fasting
Our readers here are probably not “the average person” (since we have a very health-conscious subscriber-base), but the average person in N. America consumes about 9g of salt per day, which is several multiples of the maximum recommended safe amount.
The WHO recommends no more than 5g per day, and the AHA recommends no more than 2.3g per day, and that we should aim for 1.5g per day (this is, you’ll note, consistent with the previous “1200–1500mg range”).
Read more: Massive efforts needed to reduce salt intake and protect lives
Questionable claims
We can’t speak for LMNT (and indeed, had to look them up to discover they are an electrolytes supplement brand), but we can say that sometimes there are articles about such things as “The doctor who says we should eat more salt, not less”, and that’s usually about Dr. James DiNicolantonio, a doctor of pharmacy, who wrote a book that, because of this question today, we’ve now also reviewed:
Spoiler, our review was not favorable.
The body knows
Our kidneys (unless they are diseased or missing) do a full-time job of getting rid of excess things from our blood, and dumping them into one’s urine.
That includes excess sugar (which is how diabetes was originally diagnosed) and excess salt. In both cases, they can only process so much, but they do their best.
Dr. DiNicolantino recognizes this in his book, but chalks it up to “if we do take too much salt, we’ll just pass it in urine, so no big deal”.
Unfortunately, this assumes that our kidneys have infinite operating capacity, and they’re good, but they’re not that good. They can only filter so much per hour (it’s about 1 liter of fluids). Remember we have about 5 liters of blood, consume 2–3 liters of water per day, and depending on our diet, several more liters of water in food (easy to consume several more liters of water in food if one eats fruit, let alone soups and stews etc), and when things arrive in our body, the body gets to work on them right away, because it doesn’t know how much time it’s going to have to get it done, before the next intake comes.
It is reasonable to believe that if we needed 8–10g of salt per day, as Dr. DiNicolantonio claims, our kidneys would not start dumping once we hit much, much lower levels in our blood (lower even than the daily recommended intake, because not all of the salt in our body is in our blood, obviously).
See also: How Too Much Salt Can Lead To Organ Failure
Lastly, a note about high blood pressure
This is one where the “salt’s not the bad guy” crowd have at least something close to a point, because while salt is indeed still a bad guy (if taken above the recommended amounts, without good medical reason), when it comes to high blood pressure specifically, it’s not the worst bad guy, nor is it even in the top 5:
Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than Salt
Thanks for writing in with such an interesting question!
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The Brain-Skin Doctor
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Of Brains And Breakouts
Today’s spotlight is on Dr. Claudia Aguirre. She’s a molecular neuroscientist, and today she’s going to be educating us about skin.
What? Why?
When we say “neuroscience”, we generally think of the brain. And indeed, that’s a very important part of it.
We might think about eyes, which are basically an extension of the brain.
We don’t usually think about skin, which (just like our eyes) is constantly feeding us a lot of information about our surroundings, via a little under three million nerve endings. Guess where the other ends of those nerves lead!
There’s a constant two-way communication going on between our brain and our skin.
What does she want us to know?
Psychodermatology
The brain and the skin talk to each other, and maladies of one can impact the other:
- Directly, e.g. stress prompting skin breakouts (actually this is a several-step process physiologically, but for the sake of brevity we’ll call this direct)
- Indirectly, e.g. nervous disorders that result in people scratching or picking at their skin, which prompts a whole vicious cycle of one thing making the other worse
Read more: Psychodermatology: The Brain-Skin Connection
To address both kinds of problems, clearly something beyond moisturizer is needed!
Mindfulness (meditation and beyond)
Mindfulness is a well-evidenced healthful practice for many reasons, and Dr. Aguirra argues the case for it being good for our skin too.
As she points out,
❝Cultural stress and anxiety can trigger or aggravate many skin conditions—from acne to eczema to herpes, psoriasis, and rosacea.
Conversely, a disfiguring skin condition can trigger stress, anxiety, depression, and even suicide.
Chronic, generalized anxiety can create chronic inflammation and exacerbate inflammatory skin conditions, such as those I mentioned previously.
Chronic stress can result in chronic anxiety, hypervigilance, poor sleep, and a whole cascade of effects resulting in a constant breakdown of tissues and organs, including the skin.❞
So, she recommends mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), for the above reasons, along with others!
Read more: Mind Matters
How to do it: No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
And as for “and beyond?”
Do you remember in the beginning of the pandemic, when people were briefly much more consciously trying to avoid touching their faces so much? That, too, is mindfulness. It may have been a stressed and anxious mindfulness for many*, but mindfulness nonetheless.
*which is why “mindfulness-based stress reduction” is not a redundant tautology repeated more than once unnecessarily, one time after another 😉
So: do try to keep aware of what you are doing to your skin, and so far as is reasonably practicable, only do the things that are good for it!
The skin as an endocrine organ
Nerves are not the only messengers in the body; hormones do a lot of our body’s internal communication too. And not just the ones everyone remembers are hormones (e.g. estrogen, testosterone, although yes, they do both have a big impact on skin too), but also many more, including some made in the skin itself!
Dr. Aguirra gives us a rundown of common conditions, the hormones behind them, and what we can do if we don’t want them:
Read more: Rethinking The Skin As An Endocrine Organ
Take-away advice:
For healthy skin, we need to do more than just hydrate, get good sleep, have good nutrition, and get a little sun (but not too much).
- We should also practice mindfulness-based stress reduction, and seek help for more serious mental health issues.
- We should also remember the part our hormones play in our skin, and not just the obvious ones.
Did you know that vitamin D is also a hormone, by the way? It’s not the only hormone at play in your skin by a long way, but it is an important one:
Society for Endocrinology | Vitamin D
Want to know more?
You might like this interview with Dr. Aguirre:
The Brain in Our Skin: An Interview with Dr. Claudia Aguirre
Take care!
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The Most Annoying Nutrition Tips (7 Things That Actually Work)
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You can’t out-exercise a bad diet, and getting a good diet can be a challenge depending on your starting point. Here’s Cori Lefkowith’s unglamorous seven-point plan:
Step by step
Seven things to do:
- Start tracking first: track your food intake (as it is, without changing anything) without judgment to identify realistic areas for improvement.
- Add protein: add 10g of protein to three meals daily to improve satiety, aid fat loss, and retain muscle.
- Fiber swaps: swap foods for higher-fiber options where possible to improve gut health, improve heart health, support fat loss, and promote satiety.
- Hydration: take your body weight in kilograms (or half your body weight in pounds), then get that many ounces of water daily to support metabolism and reduce cravings.
- Calorie swaps: replace or reduce calorie-dense foods to create a small, modestly sustainable calorie deficit. Your body will still adjust to this after a while; that’s fine; it’s about a gradual reduction.
- Tweak and adjust: regularly reassess and adjust your diet and habits to fit your lifestyle and progress.
- Guard against complacency: track consistently, and stay on course.
For more on all of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
The Smartest Way To Get To 20% Body Fat (Or 10% For Men)
Take care!
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For Many Rural Women, Finding Maternity Care Outweighs Concerns About Abortion Access
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BAKER CITY, Ore. — In what has become a routine event in rural America, a hospital maternity ward closed in 2023 in this small Oregon town about an hour from the Idaho border.
For Shyanne McCoy, 23, that meant the closest hospital with an obstetrician on staff when she was pregnant was a 45-mile drive away over a mountain pass.
When McCoy developed symptoms of preeclampsia last January, she felt she had the best chance of getting the care she needed at a larger hospital in Boise, Idaho, two hours away. She spent the final week of her pregnancy there, too far from home to risk leaving, before giving birth to her daughter.
Six months later, she said it seems clear to her that the health care needs of rural young women like her are largely ignored.
For McCoy and others, figuring out how to obtain adequate care to safely have a baby in Baker City has quickly eclipsed concerns about another medical service lacking in the area: abortion. But in Oregon and elsewhere in the country, progressive lawmakers’ attempts to expand abortion access sometimes clash with rural constituencies.
Oregon is considered one of the most protective states in the country when it comes to abortion. There are no legal limits on when someone can receive an abortion in the state, and the service is covered by its Medicaid system. Still, efforts to expand access in the rural, largely conservative areas that cover most of the state have encountered resistance and incredulity.
It’s a divide that has played out in elections in such states as Nevada, where voters passed a ballot measure in November that seeks to codify abortion protections in the state constitution. Residents in several rural counties opposed the measure.
In Oregon, during the months just before the Baker City closure was announced, Democratic state lawmakers were focused on a proposed pilot program that would launch two mobile reproductive health care clinics in rural areas. The bill specified that the van-based clinics would include abortion services.
State Rep. Christine Goodwin, a Republican from a southwestern Oregon district, called the proposal the “latest example” of urban legislators telling rural leaders what their communities need.
The mobile health clinic pilot was eventually removed from the bill that was under discussion. That means no new abortion options in Oregon’s Baker County — and no new state-funded maternity care either.
“I think if you expanded rural access in this community to abortions before you extended access to maternal health care, you would have an uprising on your hands,” said Paige Witham, 27, a member of the Baker County health care steering committee and the mother of two children, including an infant born in October.
A study published in JAMA in early December that examined nearly 5,000 acute care hospitals found that by 2022, 52% of rural hospitals lacked obstetrics care after more than a decade of unit closures. The health implications of those closures for young women, the population most likely to need pregnancy care, and their babies can be significant. Research has shown that added distance between a patient and obstetric care increases the likelihood the baby will be admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU.
Witham said that while she does not support abortion, she believes the government should not “legislate it away completely.” She said that unless the government provides far more support for young families, like free child care and better mental health care, abortion should remain legal.
Conversations with a liberal school board member, a moderate owner of a timber company, members of Baker City’s Republican Party chapter, a local doula, several pregnant women, and the director of the Baker County Health Department — many of whom were not rigidly opposed to abortion — all turned up the same answer: No mobile clinics offering abortions here, please.
Kelle Osborn, a nurse supervisor for the Baker County Health Department, loved the idea of a mobile clinic that would provide education and birth control services to people in outlying areas. She was less thrilled about including abortion services in a clinic on wheels.
“It’s not something that should just be handed out from a mobile van,” she said of abortion services. She said people in her conservative rural county would probably avoid using the clinics for anything if they were understood to provide abortion services.
Both Osborn and Meghan Chancey, the health department’s director, said they would rank many health care priorities higher, including the need for a general surgeon, an ICU, and a dialysis clinic.
Nationally, reproductive health care services of all types tend to be limited for people in rural areas, even within states that protect abortion access. More than two-thirds of people in “maternity care deserts” — all of which are in rural counties — must drive more than a half-hour to get obstetric care, according to a 2024 March of Dimes report. For people in the Southern states where lawmakers installed abortion bans, abortion care can be up to 700 miles away, according to a data analysis by Axios.
Nathan Defrees grew up in Baker City and has practiced medicine here since 2017. He works for a family medicine clinic. If a patient asks about abortion, he provides information about where and how one can be obtained, but he doesn’t offer abortions himself.
“There’s not a lot of anonymity in small towns for physicians who provide that care,” he said. “Many of us aren’t willing to sacrifice the rest of our career for that.”
He also pointed to the small number of patients requesting the service locally. Just six people living in Baker County had an abortion in 2023, according to data from the Oregon Department of Public Health. Meanwhile, 125 residents had a baby that year.
A doctor with obstetric training living in another rural part of the state has chosen to quietly provide early-stage abortions when asked. The doctor, concerned for their family’s safety in the small, conservative town where they live, asked not to be identified.
The idea that better access to abortion is not needed in rural areas seems naive, the doctor said. People most in need of abortion often don’t have access to any medical service not already available in town, the doctor pointed out. The first patient the doctor provided an abortion for at the clinic was a meth user with no resources to travel or to manage an at-home medication abortion.
“It seemed entirely inappropriate for me to turn her away for care I had the training and the tools to do,” the doctor said.
Defrees said it has been easier for Baker County residents to get an abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
A new Planned Parenthood clinic in Ontario, Oregon, 70 miles away in neighboring Malheur County, was built primarily to provide services to people from the Boise metro area, but it also created an option for many living in rural eastern Oregon.
Idaho is one of the 16 states with near-total bans on abortion. Like many states with bans, Idaho has struggled to maintain its already small fleet of fetal medicine doctors. The loss of regional expertise touches Baker City, too, Defrees said.
For example, he said, the treatment plan for women who have a desired pregnancy but need a termination for medical reasons is now far less clear. “It used to be those folks could go to Boise,” he said. “Now they can’t. That does put us in a bind.”
Portland is the next closest option for that type of care, and that means a 300-mile drive along a set of highways that can be treacherous in winter.
“It’s a lot scarier to be pregnant now in Baker City than it ever has been,” Defrees said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Lower Cholesterol Naturally
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Lower Cholesterol, Without Statins
We’ll start this off by saying that lowering cholesterol might not, in fact, be critical or even especially helpful for everyone, especially in the case of women. We covered this more in our article about statins:
…which was largely informed by the wealth of data in this book:
The Truth About Statins – by Dr. Barbara H. Roberts
…which in turn, may in fact put a lot of people off statins. We’re not here to tell you don’t use them—they may indeed be useful or even critical for some people, as Dr. Roberts herself also makes makes clear. But rather, we always recommend learning as much as possible about what’s going on, to be able to make the most informed choices when it comes to what often might be literally life-and-death decisions.
On which note, if anyone would like a quick refresher on cholesterol, what it actually is (in its various forms) and what it does, why we need it, the problems it can cause anyway, then here you go:
Now, with all that in mind, we’re going to assume that you, dear reader, would like to know:
- how to lower your LDL cholesterol, and/or
- how to maintain a safe LDL cholesterol level
Because, while the jury’s out on the dangers of high LDL levels for women in particular, it’s clear that for pretty much everyone, maintaining them within well-established safe zones won’t hurt.
Here’s how:
Relax
Or rather, manage your stress. This doesn’t just reduce your acute risk of a heart attack, it also improves your blood metrics along the way, and yes, that includes not just blood pressure and blood sugars, but even triglycerides! Here’s the science for that, complete with numbers:
What are the effects of psychological stress and physical work on blood lipid profiles?
With that in mind, here’s…
How To Manage Chronic Stress (Even While Chronically Stressed)
Not chemically “relaxed”, though
While relaxing is important, drinking alcohol and smoking are unequivocally bad for pretty much everything, and this includes cholesterol levels:
Can We Drink To Good Health? ← this also covers popular beliefs about red wine and heart health, and the answer is no, we cannot
As for smoking, it is good to quit as soon as possible, unless your doctor specifically advises you otherwise (there are occasional situations where something else needs to be dealt with first, but not as many some might like to believe):
Addiction Myths That Are Hard To Quit
If you’re wondering about cannabis (CBD and/or THC), then we’d love to tell you about the effect these things have on heart health in general and cholesterol levels in particular, but the science is far too young (mostly because of the historic, and in some places contemporary, illegality cramping the research), and we could only find small, dubious, mutually contradictory studies so far. So the honest answer is: science doesn’t know this one, yet.
Exercise… But don’t worry, you can still stay relaxed
When it comes to heart health, the most important thing is keeping moving, so getting in those famous 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise is critical, and getting more is ideal.
240 minutes per week is a neat 40 minutes per day, by the way and is very attainable (this writer lives a 20-minute walk away from where she does her daily grocery shopping, thus making for a daily 40-minute round trip, not counting the actual shopping).
See: The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, And Move More
If walking is for some reason not practical for you, here’s a whole list of fun options that don’t feel like exercise but are:
Manage your hormones
This one is mostly for menopausal women, though some people with atypical hormonal situations may find it applicable too.
Estrogen protects the heart… Until it doesn’t:
See also: World Menopause Day: Menopause & Cardiovascular Disease Risk
Here’s a great introduction to sorting it out, if necessary:
Dr. Jen Gunter: What You Should Have Been Told About Menopause Beforehand
Eat a heart-healthy diet
Shocking nobody, but it has to be said, for the sake of being methodical. So, what does that look like?
What Matters Most For Your Heart? Eat More (Of This) For Lower Blood Pressure
(it’s fiber in the #1 spot, but there’s a list of most important things there, that’s worth checking out and comparing it to what you habitually eat)
You can also check out the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) edition of the Mediterranean diet, here:
Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet
As for saturated fat (and especially trans-fats), the basic answer is to keep them to minimal, but there is room for nuance with saturated fats at least:
Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy?
And lastly, do make sure to get enough omega 3 fatty-acids:
What Omega-3s Really Do For Us
And enjoy plant sterols and stanols! This would need a whole list of their own, so here you go:
Take These To Lower Cholesterol! (Statin Alternatives)
Take care!
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How To Leverage Placebo Effect For Yourself
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Placebo Effect: Making Things Work Since… Well, A Very Long Time Ago
The placebo effect is a well-known, well-evidenced factor that is very relevant when it comes to the testing and implementation of medical treatments:
NIH | National Center for Biotechnology Information | Placebo Effect
Some things that make placebo effect stronger include:
- Larger pills instead of small ones: because there’s got to be more going on in there, right?
- Thematically-colored pills: e.g. red for stimulant effects, blue for relaxing effects
- Things that seem expensive: e.g. a well-made large heavy machine, over a cheap-looking flimsy plastic device. Similarly, medication from a small glass jar with a childproof lock, rather than popped out from a cheap blister-pack.
- Things that seem rational: if there’s an explanation for how it works that you understand and find rational, or at least you believe you understand and find rational ← this works in advertising, too; if there’s a “because”, it lands better almost regardless of what follows the word “because”
- Things delivered confidently by a professional: this is similar to the “argument from authority” fallacy (whereby a proposed authority will be more likely trusted, even if this is not their area of expertise at all, e.g. celebrity endorsements), but in the case of placebo trials, this often looks like a well-dressed middle-aged or older man with an expensive haircut calling for a young confident-looking aide in a lab coat to administer the medicine, and is received better than a slightly frazzled academic saying “and, uh, this one’s yours” while handing you a pill.
- Things with ritual attached: this can be related to the above (the more pomp and circumstance is given to the administration of the treatment, the better), but it can also be as simple as an instruction on an at-home-trial medication saying “take 20 minutes before bed”. Because, if it weren’t important, they wouldn’t bother to specify that, right? So it must be important!
And now for a quick personality test
Did you see the above as a list of dastardly tricks to watch out for, or did you see the above as a list of things that can make your actual medication more effective?
It’s arguably both, of course, but the latter more optimistic view is a lot more useful than the former more pessimistic one.
Since placebo effect works at least somewhat even when you know about it, there is nothing to stop you from leveraging it for your own benefit when taking medication or doing health-related things.
Next time you take your meds or supplements or similar, pause for a moment for each one to remember what it is and what it will be doing for you. This is a lot like the principles (which are physiological as well as psychological) of mindful eating, by the way:
How To Get More Nutrition From The Same Food
Placebo makes some surprising things evidence-based
We’ve addressed placebo effect sometimes as part of an assessment of a given alternative therapy, often in our “Mythbusting Friday” edition of 10almonds.
- In some cases, placebo is adjuvant to the therapy, i.e. it is one of multiple mechanisms of action (example: chiropractic or acupuncture)
- In some cases, placebo is the only known mechanism of action (example: homeopathy)
- In some cases, even placebo can’t help (example: ear candling)
One other fascinating and far-reaching (in a potentially good way) thing that placebo makes evidence-based is: prayer
…which is particularly interesting for something that is fundamentally faith-based, i.e. the opposite of evidence-based.
Now, we’re a health science publication, not a theological publication, so we’ll consider actual divine intervention to be beyond the scope of mechanisms of action we can examine, but there’s been a lot of research done into the extent to which prayer is beneficial as a therapy, what things it may be beneficial for, and what factors affect whether it helps:
Prayer and healing: A medical and scientific perspective on randomized controlled trials
👆 full paper here, and it is very worthwhile reading if you have time, whether or not you are religious personally
Placebo works best when there’s a clear possibility for psychosomatic effect
We’ve mentioned before, and we’ll mention again:
- psychosomatic effect does not mean: “imagining it”
- psychosomatic effect means: “your brain regulates almost everything else in your body, directly or indirectly, including your autonomic functions, and especially notably when it comes to illness, your immune responses”
So, a placebo might well heal your rash or even shrink a tumor, but it probably won’t regrow a missing limb, for instance.
And, this is important: it’s not about how credible/miraculous the outcome will be!
Rather, it is because we have existing pre-programmed internal bodily processes for healing rashes and shrinking tumors, that just need to be activated—whereas we don’t have existing pre-programmed internal bodily processes for regrowing a missing limb, so that’s not something our brain can just tell our body to do.
So for this reason, in terms of what placebo can and can’t do:
- Get rid of cancer? Yes, sometimes—because the body has a process for doing that; enjoy your remission
- Fix a broken nail? No—because the body has no process for doing that; you’ll just have to cut it and wait for it to grow again
With that in mind, what will you use the not-so-mystical powers of placebo for? What ever you go for… Enjoy, and take care!
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